[lit-ideas] "Nothing Noths"

From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2009 03:32:26 EST

In a message dated 11/10/2009 2:22:47 A.M. Eastern Standard Time,  
lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:

I thought Heidegger was being  purposely obscure so that his 
less-intelligent Gestapo overseers  wouldn’t know what the heck he was talking 
about and 
leave him alone.  I  received no support for that early theory of  mine.
 
--- Add Grice.
 
When delivering his 1967 William James lectures at Harvard (of all places)  
he said,
 
   provocatively
 
    "Heidegger is the greatest living philosopher"
 
WoW (googlebooks, i).
 
For anglo-philosophers (like myself, for I have read mostly  
anglo-philosophers), Heidegger is a good joke. It all started in Oxford in 
1929,  when 
Gilbert Ryle (not yet professor of metaphysical philosophy) reviewed "Sein  und 
Zeit" for _Mind_.
 
When Ryle's student (Ayer) went to Vienna, he came back with that bit of  
propaganda, that
 
          "Das Nicht nichtet"  (Nothing noths) -- "Sein und Zeit" was only 
LATER translated.
 
was a bit of a piece of nonsense.
 
In the Vienna circle quarters, the idea of 'metaphysics' as 'nonsense' (or  
flouting of syntax rules) was fashionable.
 
Grice tried all his life to untie himself from the Vienna Circle  
constraints. But he ran along lines different from Heidegger. For Grice, it  
became 
increasingly obvious that the Vienna Circle's concerns with metaphysics  were 
too prohibitive.
 
I agree with you, and with Geary, that Heidegger waxes poetical, and that  
his English translation do not do him any justice.
 
--- Oddly, in Argentina, for those who are NOT committed Griceans,  
Heidegger is "palabra santa" (sacred word). Many a metaphysics course in the  
University of Buenos Aires was dictated along nothing but STRICTLY metaphysical 
 
lines. Heidegger translates VERY well to the romance languages. "Ser-ahi" 
for  example is the Dasein.
 
I once analysed the "da" in "Dasein", for surely it is idiotic to stick to  
the explicature of 'there' in things like "Being There" (the film with 
Peter  Sellars). "There is" is NOT 'geographical' in "There is a green hill far 
away",  or perhaps it is.
 
All the other linguistic concoctions of Heidegger make similarly good  
sense. His prose was refreshing in more than one way. Consider the more  
literalistic prose of a Jasper as he sticks to his neo-Kantian forefathers.  
Heidegger is also considered to have taken the phenomenological tradition of  
Husserl seriously enough.
 
When Sartre made Heidegger popular in France, that was the death for  
Heidegger. Sartre's French is never as convoluted as Heidegger's German and 
thus  
less of a pleasure to read.
 
But again, one thing is to read Heidegger in your night stand for the sheer 
 pleasure of it; another to have to be _tested_ on him in metaphysics 
courses,  where doctors of philosophy feel it's their duty to corrupt their 
students by  instilling on them the Heideggerian jargon. It has to grow 
naturally 
on  you.
 
Cheers,
 
J. L. Speranza
   Bordighera, etc.
[lit-ideas] "Nothing Noths"

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